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Tuesday, April 17, 2007
Needed: Big game from big players
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I think Bobby Holik put it best this morning — the Thrashers one-game season starts tonight. A loss, and it’s over. The team was pretty loose today, but as Jon Sim pointed out, they were also a little more business-like. This is a focused team that desperately needs a win, and they have to do it in front of a group of fans Holik called the best sports fans in the world.
It’s going to be loud, but more important than that, Rangers coach Tom Renney now has the ability to shake Jaromir Jagr from the Holik line with final line changes. There is even talk of double shifting Jagr, so that might be an interesting aspect for tonight’s game, it’ll be a chess match that’s for sure.
Steve Zipay at Newsday had a great line from Renney when he asked about using the home-ice advantage to free Jagr from Holik. Here was Renney’s response to Zipay - “Bob [Hartley] reads,” he said. “You can speculate, I’ll just leave it at that.”
The goaltending situation for the Thrashers continues to be a hot topic up here. Larry Brooks points in his column in the New York Post that Hartley never had goalie decisions to make in Colorado because of Patrick Roy, perhaps questioning Hartley’s decision to start Lehtonen. Brooks wrote “Atlanta will be switching back to Kari Lehtonen even though he left acres of the net at which to shoot in the 4-3, Game 1 defeat and was benched for Game 2 in favor of Johan Hedberg who was magnificent.”
Wow, acres of net.
Hartley said yesterday that the goalie switch will be the only lineup change. The lines looked the same, with Mellanby skating with the Chuks, although we saw a lot of Sim in that spot in the third period last game, and wouldn’t be surprised to see it again.
Don’t be surprised to see some personnel changes in the power play. We saw some of Dupuis on the PP last game, and there were some different looks at practice on Monday. They need to do something to get it started — Keith Tkachuk said today that it’ll all start with more shots from the point, then better efforts on the second and third rebound.
But the bottom line for tonight was summed up by Hartley as he walked away from the media scrum this morning. He said, the big guys have to be the big guys. Kari Lehtonen is going to need to respond with a big game, Marian Hossa’s scoring is desperately needed, Ilya Kovalchuk will need to continue to play well, the same goes for Keith Tkachuk. The Thrashers need top performances from their top players. It’s that simple.
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